The storm before the calm

No I haven’t written that the wrong way round. It’s how I feel this morning as I sit looking out onto the day starting to get light. This week has been manic with everything from trying to put marketing campaigns together, write content for my new website, clients appointments, networking, finalising an expo taking place on Tuesday and keeping the household and family doing what it needs to be doing. Multi tasking at the highest order. Successful? Yes and no. More overwhelm than success.

Sometimes we forget to practice what we preach don’t we and rather than doing my usual brain dump and prioritising what was needed I chose to try and get it all done, not only that but tried to get it all done at the same time. That’s impossible by the way! One job completed to a high standard is better than five jobs unfinished.

It’s been chaos, noisy, fast paced, stressful, out of control and generally dissatisfying. But this is a good thing for me. It reminds me of how my clients feel and why they come to me but also reminds me that these days I have clearly defined strategies for dealing with them so I don’t break down. This week has been my storm but today I woke at peace.

I woke realising how grateful I am that I have the life I do. My new business is successful, I have fabulously supportive friends, my brother survived a heart attack this week, my children are happy and healthy and I am loved. There is nothing better than this. I left the weeks storm behind and woke this morning in the calm.

How? I let it all go. For now. For now I need calm. I wrote down everything I had to do as I felt like I had hundreds on my list because they were tripping over each other, shouting at one another and generally causing chaos in my head. There were actually 18 ! Then I scored them on their level of criticality, from 1-10 with 1 being critical. Finally I added a “to be done by” date for each score. I actually only had three things on my “to be done by Tuesday list” and that makes everything more manageable. It took me just ten minutes to create order and calm!

As a society we try to accomplish so much and put pressure on ourselves to do it all now. Whether that’s because it makes us look better if we are busy or whether, if we can be seen to be doing more than the next person, we must be more successful or whether we have just forgotten to manage our time to how we need and want it rather than the expectations of others. It’s time to stop, physically or mentally create your list of order and then sit back for a minute and breathe.